the way from the scene of the killings right to the spots where you’re standing this very instant. Now, I’m a reasonable man. Be more’n happy to entertain the possibility of taking you to Fort Worth for suitable trial and hanging, long as you give up your weapons, right by-God now, then let us slap you in shackles and chains.” Under my breath, I whispered to no one in particular, “You’ll never do it, though, will you, you son of a bitch? Now, jerk that smoke wagon and give me a reason to send you straight to Satan.”
Roscoe Pickett’s feral eyes flicked from side to side as though trying to look through me. A twitching hand still hovered over his pistol’s bone grip. He took a half step back toward the cantina’s porch. The entire trio sucked away from me and moved ever so slightly in the direction of the tavern’s entrance like a small, nervous, human wave.
“You jus’ said ‘we’ and ‘us.’ Where’s them others, Dodge?” Roscoe snarled. “Got some more men with you? Where are they?”
“It’s enough you know that my posse’s here and can come if I need them. Now pitch all your pistols, knives, hideout guns, and such out here in the street. Then step away from Arturo’s front door and get your faces down in the dirt where they belong.”
Roscoe’s lips twisted into an angry, tense sneer. “Damned if we will. Ain’t givin’ up my gun to no man. Gonna have to use that long-barreled shooter a yern, Dodge.”
“Me, neither,” Priest growled. “Keepin’ my pistol fer damned sure.”
I could easily see the belligerence of the coming fight grow in their intoxicated eyes before any of them had even made the slightest move toward their weapons. Then, from nowhere, the mute Cullen Pickett’s hand suddenly dropped to the ivory grips of the Smith & Wesson Russian model shooter snugged high and crosswise against his left hip.
A horror-stricken Roscoe tried to wave his unthinking brother off, but before either man could clear leather, the Winchester thundered, bucked, and slapped a massive blue whistler into the bony, centermost part of the elder Pickett’s chest. Sixty grains of spent black powder delivered a 395-grain chunk of pure lead into Roscoe’s breastbone, and from thence out his back and into the wall behind him. A fist-sized wad of the man’s blood and splintered bits of rib bone followed the bullet. The club-like blow knocked the stunned killer backward onto the porch amidst a cloud of swirling wood fragments.
The barrel of Cullen’s cocked weapon had almost topped his gun leather’s front lip when the second ear- splitting blast from my rifle punched a hole in the man’s forehead just above his left eye. The red-hot bullet plowed a furrow through half his addled brain, ricocheted around inside the man’s skull. The massive slug knocked his palm-leaf hat off when it exited through the top of his head, then carved a blood-spattered hole in the roof above. In spite of being dead where he stood, Cullen’s handgun went off. The blast ripped the entire face out of his holster. The wayward shot kicked up a flying cloud of dirt a few paces into the windblown street. Woman-killing scum went down like all the bones had been jerked out of his body at the same time.
The only man on the porch who’d not uttered a single word during the entire confrontation went to the ground like a load of brick dropped from the roof of a San Antone whorehouse. I knew without bothering to check that Cullen Pickett was deader than Wild Bill was when his head hit the poker table in Deadwood’s NO. 10 Saloon.
In his whiskey-sodden haste to get outside and pick a fight with a man who appeared to be alone, Priest Pickett had completely forgotten to flip the hammer thong away from his weapon. The sound of my two shots still hung in the air as he panicked and jerked on the uncooperative shooter once, twice, three times.
On the third try, the crazy-eyed varmint’s sweaty fingers slipped from the oiled walnut grips with such force he came nigh on to slapping himself right in the face. Terrified, flusterated, and unnerved, he grabbed at the weapon again and fired a burning shot down his own right leg that chewed a massive hole in the plank porch at his feet. Then, the confused child murderer screeched like a wounded animal, turned on his heel, and went to running like he’d lost his mind. Darted past Glorious Johnson’s hiding spot around the corner.
Standing amidst a roiling cloud of spent black-powder smoke, I levered a third shell into the rifle’s receiver and called out, “He’s yours, Glo.”
With the stock of the Greener pressed to his shoulder, Glo stepped away from his hiding place like a man on a leisurely stroll to Sunday school and yelled, “You can go on and stop runnin’ now, Mr. Pickett.”
Guess Priest made two more steps before a cannon-like wad of tightly grouped buckshot blasted him between the shoulder blades. A gob of lead lifted the fleeing killer out of his boots like a rag doll and dumped him onto his face. A handful of witnesses, who had viewed the action from inside the paltry group of functioning business in Carta Blanca
16
“DAMNATION, GIRL ...”
I SHOVED THREE fresh rounds into the Winchester’s loading gate and watched as a dying Roscoe Pickett dragged himself to Mendoza’s nearest porch pillar and propped one shoulder against it.
Rifle held out with one hand to cover the wounded outlaw, I strolled over to a position a few feet from him and squatted down to where the fading man could see me. Coach gun at the ready, Boz sidled up from his spot behind the now-dead Cullen’s original position.
“Well you sure as hell kilt the bejabbers out of these two, Lucius. Didn’t leave much for me,” Boz mumbled.
Blood poured from the corner of Roscoe’s twitching mouth and oozed from between the fingers clutching the hole in an already drenched chest. “Damn,” he gurgled. “That was fast. Cain’t b-b-believe it. S-shot me s-so quick. Son of a bitch. You done w-w-went and shot me through and th-through. Shit. Hurts like hell on a b-b-burnin’ stick. Prolley done went and kilt me deader’n a rotten stump. God Am-mighty. K-Kilt my brothers, too. D-d-damn you, Dodge.”
“Yes,” I said and nodded. “Yes indeed. Your sorry brothers are both very dead. And you’re headed to Hell with ’em.”
The outlaw groaned, rolled his head from side to side, then gasped, “W-w-well, soon’s I’m gone, you can roll me over, p-p-pull my britches down, bend over, and k-k-kiss my ass, Dodge.”
Rustling movement caused me to twist on the balls of my feet and glance over one shoulder. A step or so away from the bloody carnage of dying and dead men, I spotted Clementine Webb, with one hand rested on the panting Bear’s thick neck. From somewhere the girl had acquired a spanking-new Mexican palm-leaf hat.
“Ask him where the others went,” she said through gritted teeth.
I swung my concentrated attention back to Roscoe. “We already know where they’re going, Clem. Big Jim said he saw them heading out for Del Rio, remember?”
Her voice sounded like broken icicles falling from a frozen roof in Kansas when she snarled, “Where, exactly, Ranger Dodge? Those that kept running must’ve been in a hurry to meet somebody, somewhere, don’t you think? Who were they in such a hurry to see? Where did they intend to meet? How long do we have before they get completely away?”
I flicked a glance at the dying sun, then stared at the ground between my feet for a second and said, “Well, you heard the lady, Pickett. Who’re Murdock and Atwood so hot to meet up with in Del Rio that they would leave you boys here and go on ahead without you?”
A gurgling stream of pinkish-red froth bubbled from between the claw-like fingers clutching at Pickett’s chest. An unglier, darker river dribbled out onto his chin. “Ain’t—ain’t—ain’t tellin’. Ain’t tellin’ you bastards a goddamned thang. Sure, s-s-sure’s hell ain’t got nothin’, nothin’ to say to no runty, s-s-smart-assed split-tail of a girl.”
I felt the crackle of Clementine’s sleeve as it grazed my elbow. It sounded like fresh-fired bullets sizzling past my ear when she hissed, “Well, then, you’re completely useless to me or anyone else, aren’t you?”
From the corner of one eye, I saw the little pistol flash up in the girl’s hand and immediately recognized the weapon as a New Line .32-caliber pocket pistol.
For reasons I could not have explained to God, or anyone else, afterward, the fact that Clementine Webb had the barrel of a loaded weapon pressed to the end of the dying Roscoe Pickett’s nose just didn’t register with me for
